We start May out with a visit from our very own guest expert Hendrik Varju of Passion for Wood. This month’s topic is “Starting a Woodworking Business” and we received a number of great questions from all of you.

It’s no secret many of us hope and dream of a day when we can hang a sign and spend our days in the shop designing and building custom pieces of furniture for customers who can’t get enough of our craftsmanship. But what does it take to get a shop up and running and how do you deal with the “out of shop” stuff? Many of these questions were sent in and Hendrik did his best to answer them as thoroughly as only Hendrik can.

And in case you have more questions about this topic, coming up on June 5th, 2010 Hendrik has an all day seminar at his own shop covering this discussion. Attendees will of course have access to ask Hendrik specific questions maybe not covered in today’s show, or to ask him for more details on specific topics we did. Not to mention each attendee gets a copy of his book “Starting a Woodworking Business”, which is available at his website, www.passionforwood.com for those who can’t make it.

If it weren’t for all this debt myself I’d be teaching the family an important lesson on “a lot less is so much more”, especially because daddy wants to build furniture rather than do what he thought he wanted to do while in college LOL!

Great show. … In the USA, the sba.gov and the volunteer SCORE organization are helpful on general business issues (setting expectations, business plans, marketing plans, etc), But Hendrik hits many points on the head! ….